Given the amount of nervousness, fear, and uncertainty many women face with the unpredictability of pregnancy—not to mention the strange-to-reckon-with fact that a small, separate being in a liquid sack is slowly incubating inside you—it’s a wonder there aren’t dozens of horror pregnancy films conceived every year. Ilana Glazer’s riff on this genre, “False Positive,” from A24 and Hulu, is born from the emotional turmoil that often accompanies pregnancy. Exacerbate that turmoil with the stress that accompanies high-risk conception, and you have a very potent concoction of prenatal anxiety.
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“This pregnancy shit is no joke. It’s really scary,” a friend says comfortingly at an early turning point in the slippery, satirical psychological thriller. “But you are not alone.” But what if, the film asks, your cocoon of social support and perinatal care is actually an illusion?
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Co-written by Glazer and her director John Lee (a filmmaking collaborator she met on “Broad City”), the sharply-observed “False Positive” centers on Lucy (Glazer) and her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux), an up-and-coming marketing executive and a prosperous surgeon, respectively. While they appear to be a successful dream couple on the surface, Lucy and Adrian have been trying to get pregnant with no results for two years, and the constant frustration and concern over her ovarian architecture is coming to a head. While Lucy wants to get pregnant naturally, she eventually relents when Adrian suggests his friend and mentor, renowned reproductive specialist Dr. John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), assist.
In the perfect but clinical headquarters of Hindle’s immaculate practice, greeted by his loyal and eerily cheery head nurse (Gretchen Mol), the doctor’s miracle fertility cocktails work abundantly. Soon, Lucy is pregnant with triplets but could face the difficult choice of selective reduction.
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However, in the interim, Lucy is overwhelmed by the whirlwind nature of all myriad medical procedures and visits. In her disoriented, vulnerable state, she joins a mommy support group and befriends Corgan (Sophia Bush), to whom she confides her mounting fears about the pregnancy. One of Lucy’s darkest confessions to her new friend is her growing suspicion that something sinister lurks behind the charming, arrogant smile of her superstar doctor, and worse, that her husband may be complicit in some kind of conspiracy.
Expectant with many ideas surrounding the patriarchal birth industrial complex, the gaslighting involved in the myth of blissful, serene pregnancy, the sexist condescension in the idea of “mommy brain,” the inherent misogyny of the professional world’s approach to expectant and working mothers, and a Peter Pan-like theme of fantasy, “False Positive” has a lot on its mind. Not all of it always works, and it’s a bit slippery, but the film fascinates nonetheless.
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As Lucy begins to lose her grip on reality and questions her doctor and friends, “False Positive” begins to lose its way, mostly because it never really clarifies whether Lucy is paranoid and crazy or truly being tricked. Normally, this ambiguity is the thrill and fun of psychological horror, but when the protagonist is a manipulated pregnant person deceived by the patriarchal industry around her and those that buy into its narrative, this uncertainty is a harder pill to swallow.
To that end, there’s also a strange subplot with a warm Black midwife, Grace Singleton (Zainab Jah), who is supposed to represent a more soulful and authentic alternative to the sterility of Dr. Hindle’s clinic and interventional medicine. But when the Afrocentric décor of her office disappears, we’re left questioning Lucy, and whether she’s both delusional and imposing some “magical negro” stereotypes on the midwife she believes will solve all her problems (“False Positive” knowingly toys with this idea, but it never plays in Lucy’s favor).
And herein lies the main issue. Much is made about the empowering “birth story,” the narrative a woman chooses to tell about the journey of birthing her baby, and much of “False Positive” is about Lucy’s agency and trying to control her own narrative. The film wants us to empathize with her plight, and we’re more than eager to do so. However, the film, in its effort to play with surreality and keep the audience on its toes, often inadvertently robs Lucy by turning her into an unreliable narrator: we don’t know if she’s delusional, dreaming, having a nightmare, genuinely being maltreated, or all of the above in swirl of deception.
Trust and lack thereof are a big theme, and the film crescendos in a wild, bloody climax of violence, rage, and catharsis: this is, after all, a woman who has been gaslit to the hilt and has had enough. The climax is entertaining and crazy but not necessarily as satisfying as it hopes to be. Still, for all its flaws and inability to deliver in the end, “False Positive” is a captivating take on the misrepresentation of the pregnancy “glow.” It’s also a promising beginning for Glazer and Lee. One hopes this is the first in a long line of cinematic offspring playing with genre and deconstructing feminine social constructs ala Jordan Peele with horror, social critique, and race. [B-]
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